In those ancient times the rigors of earthly existence, including the wickedness of men, were on the whole accepted as an inexorable fatality, and their abolition was with good reason believed to be impossible

In those ancient times so much decried in our days, the rigors of earthly existence, including the wickedness of men, were on the whole accepted as an inexorable fatality, and their abolition was with good reason believed to be impossible; in the midst of the trials of life, those of the hereafter were not forgotten, and it was admitted moreover that man needs suffering as well as pleasure here below and that a collectivity cannot maintain itself in the fear of God and in piety by contact with nothing but the agreeable; such was the thinking of the elite at all levels of society. Miseries, whose deep-seated cause is always the violation of a celestial norm as well as indifference toward Heaven and our final ends, are there to restrain the greedy illusions of men, rather in the same way as the carnivores are there to prevent the herbivores from degenerating or multiplying to excess, all this by virtue of universal equilibrium and the homogeneity of the world; to be aware of this is part of the fear of God. In light of this elementary wisdom, a progress conditioned by spiritual indifference and an idolatry of well-being taken as an end in itself cannot constitute a real advantage, that is, an advantage proportioned to our total nature and our immortal kernel; this is evident enough, but even in the most “believing” environments, people go so far as to claim that technical progress is an indisputable good and that it is thus a blessing even from the point of view of faith. In reality modern civilization gives in order to take: it gives the world but takes away God; and it is this that compromises even its gift of the world.

 

In our day there is a stronger tendency than ever to reduce

happiness to the level of economic well-being—which is moreover insatiable in the face of an indefinite creation of artificial needs and a base mystique of envy—but what is completely lost sight of when this outlook is projected into the past is that a traditional craft and a contact with nature and natural things are factors essential to human happiness. Now these are just the factors that disappear in industry, which demands all too often, if not always, an inhuman environment and “quasi-abstract” manipulations, gestures with no intelligibility and no soul, all in an atmosphere of frigid cunning; we have arrived beyond all possibility of argument at the antipodes of what the Gospel means when it enjoins us to “become as little children” and to “take no thought for the morrow”. The machine transposes the need for happiness onto a purely quantitative plane, having no relation to the spiritual quality of work; it takes away from the world its homogeneity and transparency and cuts men off from the meaning of life. More and more we attempt to reduce our intelligence to what the machine demands and our capacity for happiness to what it offers; since we cannot humanize the machine, we are obliged, by a certain logic at least, to mechanize man; having lost contact with the human, we stipulate what man is and what happiness is.

 

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Frithjof Schuon: Light on The Ancient Worlds

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